Undo what's done
by jomiddlemarch
Summary: It wasn't so simple, lifting an enchantment. There were artifacts left behind.


There was no fur in the castle. There hadn't been for years, though Mrs. Potts had tut-tutted just as loudly as an article of china as she had once she resumed her proper form. She had implored the Prince to consider the comfort of any stranger who might approach the enchanted castle, "a stranger who might free us all and how much more readily if he is warm and comfortable?" but it had been to no avail. It had been a difficult chore without clever hands and strong arms to rid the rooms of their fur coverlets, the wardrobes of fur-lined cloaks, fur-trimmed gantlets and boots, even the few winter gowns left folded in a chest from the dead Princess, the Prince's mother, but he'd insisted and Lumiere had made a game of it as he did everything. The housekeeper had thought when the curse was lifted, her master would relent and allow her to retrieve the costly items they had cast out or replace them with even finer counterparts for the pleasure of the new Princess, but there had been no such order and the tone Adam took when she broached the subject was so like the Beast at his worst that she withdrew at once. She'd begun to understand that though the spell had been broken, there were wounds that had yet to heal; Agathe had altered the man in more ways that she might have anticipated or perhaps the witch had simply not cared as fairy folk often did not.

Belle had not noticed the lack. She had grown up itinerant and poor and a velvet cape faced with silvery mink or gloves lined with rabbit were as remote as a parure of emeralds, the Dauphin's glittering crown. She was used to the cold and she expected to shiver when she woke, when she cracked the ice on the water in the basin to wash in the morning. She was accustomed to chafing her hands back to warmth and finding a momentary, transfiguring relief in a rough red wine heated with a twist of dried herbs, cloves if the music-boxes had sold well at the last market-day. She did not complain and it was summer first and then autumn before the winter came again, a real winter with sunny blue days and chill fogs that curled through the last, livid leaves on the oaks to break the monotony of ice and silent snowfalls. She only wrapped her shawl around her more snugly while she sat reading and knitted herself a pair of fingerless mitts so she might continue building her latest machine with some agility. Adam did not observe all the ways she managed but Mrs. Potts did and the day she found the mistress rubbing her hands together in preparation of ride to the village with only her wool cloak to protect her from the elements, the housekeeper decided it was time for another change.

She convinced Belle to wait by the fire, making up some nonsense about the horse, a biddable black mare ironically named Iris, and went directly to find the Prince in his laboratory, to beard the lion in his den she might have thought but never, ever uttered. That was the only remark she meant to censor.

"Sir, I beg your leave to interrupt but it won't do. It simply won't do and if you haven't the pair of eyes in your head to see it, I suppose I'll have to show you!" she announced.

"What ever are you about, Mrs. Potts?" he replied, setting down some instrument made a glass, one he could never have handled in his most recent incarnation.

"The Princess, Mistress Belle—you're not caring for her as you ought and it's a disgrace, though it pains me to say it," she said, nodding to herself at the rightness of the words and the answering flush on his cheeks.

"What's wrong with her? Tell me straightaway," he demanded and the sound of the fear in his voice was so much greater than any irritation or anger with her that the heart within her relented.

"She's cold," she said.

"Cold?" he repeated, his voice confused. His brow was furrowed in a way she hadn't realized she missed when he was the Beast and his familiar face had been hidden except for his eyes. Those she would never forget.

"It's winter now and there is not one fur in this castle. Not one! Her things, the ones she brought with her, they aren't very fine and none of them adequate for the weather. We may light as many fires as you wish, sir, but this is a castle and there's nothing we can do about the way the stone holds the chill, the drafts. Think of what you have seen, what you must know," she explained.

"I couldn't bear them," he said, pausing at the memory. "To see them strewn about and look at myself, to know I could be the same, to wonder what lurked within the creatures they'd covered. Do you understand?"

She hadn't, not until he'd said it, but it made a certain sense. A perfect sense, if she could admit it to herself, and she didn't mind so much for what he had had them do but now, it meant something different.

"I do, sir. I do and she would too, she may already know and one way or another, she won't ask but don't you think, don't you think you'd want her comfortable more than anything else?" Mrs. Potts asked and waited to see the way the blue of his eyes changed, like the dawn and the sea, like the flicker in a peacock's feather.

"Yes. That's what I want. I'm sure you know what to do," he said and then reached out a hand, such an elegant, human hand, and laid it on her forearm in its muslin sleeve. "Thank you. For knowing best—now and then and in the days to come, as I'm sure you will."

"Now then, you'll make me blush and I haven't done that since I was a girl of sixteen!" she said, nodding at him, the man she'd hoped he would become, never quite despairing of him even if the others had. She'd held him in her arms as a tired child and drawn up the covers over a drunken prince who'd never forgotten to thank her, however slurred his _Merci, madame_ had been, however broken. "I'll put what's needful in your chamber and send her along."

He'd used the west staircase to get the the room before Belle did, taking the stairs two at a time, an odd tension, half-excitement, half-dread, making him shiver but not with the cold that affected Belle so. She had hurried to him but he had still arrived in their chamber first, seeing Mrs. Potts's handwork carefully laid out on the folded silken duvet.

"Adam, what it is, _cheri_? Mrs. Potts said to come here directly. I rather thought she might even scold me not to dawdle but are you all right?" Belle exclaimed, slightly breathless as she entered their bedroom. He looked at her with her shawl belted neatly at the waist, heavy stockings visible beneath her skirts as they swayed around her swift feet, accommodations she made without a thought that she no longer had to.

"I'm fine…or I will be when I know you are," he replied. He could not help smiling at the way she raised her eyebrows in quizzical confusion. "Mrs. Potts found me and informed me that I am a sorry Prince and even sorrier husband for not noticing how the winter has troubled you."

"Adam? Speak plainly, would you?" She tapped her right foot impatiently, reassured by his tone that there was nothing truly wrong. She'd told him a breakfast about her plans for the day and he knew she had intended to make some calls in Villeneuve before the sun set.

"You're cold, this castle might as well be a Siberian ice-palace these days, and I've done nothing to keep you warm," he said.

"Nothing? I hardly think that is true," she contradicted him with a wonderfully wry and flirtatious twist to her soft red lip. He felt the urge to stop her mouth with his and withdraw to the welcoming bed with her while the snow fell outside, filling the casement windows with a shifting tableau of white; the storm had not begun yet though and he remembered who she wished to visit in the village, her little student Marie-Laure and the weaver's wife who looked after her father without being asked.

"You deserve furs—and you shall have them. Here," he said, stepping behind her with the mink-lined cloak, to drape it around her shoulders. Their hands met at her throat where the worked clasp was but feeling him, she dropped hers and stroked the silky fur so slowly he grasped the depth of her pleasure at the touch. Perhaps they were not equally glad at the departure of the Beast…

"Don't say it, don't say you don't need it, for you do, that you don't deserve it. Don't tell me you don't like it unless you don't," he added, resting his hands on her slender shoulders. It was easier than he had thought, to see the fur against her shape and now to imagine the furs heaped above them in the long night, to realize the freedom the warmth would give them to delight in each other, able to stretch out beside, along, atop each other. The luxury of it on a bitter night would make her giggle first and then sigh against his ear, his throat, her mouth following her hands, gasp when he rolled them over and began with her ankles, her bare skin blazing against him.

"I do, very much I do like it," she said. Her voice held every promise he could want and some he could not have hoped for but that she would still give him. He was supposed to tell her to not mind him, to attend to her errands but he found he couldn't and that she knew it.

"I shan't be very long, Adam," she murmured. "When I come home, you can help me take this off, _n'est-ce pas_?"


End file.
